Why No Safe Room to Run To? Cost and Plains Culture

The Web site for the City of Moore, Okla., recommends “that every residence have a storm safe room or an underground cellar.” It says below-ground shelters are the best protection against tornadoes.

But no local ordinance or building code requires such shelters, either in houses, schools or businesses, and only about 10 percent of homes in Moore have them.

Nor does the rest of Oklahoma, one of the states in the storm belt called Tornado Alley, require them — despite the annual onslaught of deadly and destructive twisters like the one on Monday, which killed at least 24 people, injured hundreds and eliminated entire neighborhoods.

It is a familiar story, as well, in places like Joplin, Mo., and across the Great Plains and in the Deep South, where tornadoes are a seasonal threat but government regulation rankles.

In 2011, a monster tornado razed large parts of Joplin, killing 160 people in a state that had no storm-shelter requirements. The city considered requiring shelters in rebuilt or new homes but decided that doing so would be “cost prohibitive” because the soil conditions make building basements expensive, said the assistant city manager, Sam Anselm. Even so, he estimated that half the homes that had been rebuilt included underground shelters. Schools were being rebuilt with safe rooms, he said.

In Moore, the Web site explains that the city has no community shelter because a 15-minute warning is not enough time to get to safety and because, “overall, people face less risk by taking shelter in a reasonably well-constructed residence.”

This is generally true, but not for a storm like Monday’s milewide tornado, which was a terrible reminder of a tornado that caused extensive damage on May 3, 1999.

Curtis McCarty, a member of the Oklahoma Uniform Building Code Commission and a builder himself, said the twister on Monday would have defeated attempts to resist it above ground. “You cannot build a structure that’s going to take a direct hit from a tornado like that that’s going to stand,” he said.

The city’s Web site sounds tones that, in retrospect, might seem implausibly optimistic. It says the experience in 1999 — “an extremely unique event weatherwise” — meant that the standard “shelter in place” methods of protection were adequate. If another storm comes, “there’s only a less than 1 percent chance of it being as strong and violent as what we experienced” before.

Larry Graves, a project manager with Downey Consulting, an engineering company in Oklahoma City that works with schools, said buildings had been upgraded with safe rooms in a piecemeal way in recent years. “You’re seeing more of it, but it’s a big funding item,” he said, noting that a school district might reinforce a large common bathroom with concrete or build an extra-strong gymnasium as a shelter.

Without added protection, Mr. Graves said, the drill is roughly the same as it was when he was a schoolboy 40 years ago: “They move you into the hallway, and you stay there tucked up and wait it out.”

Construction standards in Moore have been studied extensively. In a 2002 study published in the journal of the American Meteorological Society, Timothy P. Marshal, an engineer in Dallas, suggested that “the quality of new home construction generally was no better than homes built prior to the tornado” in 1999.

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A family emerges after the tornado struck Moore, Okla., where shelters are optional, and rare.CreditReuters

Few homes built in the town after the storm were secured to their foundations with bolted plates, which greatly increase resistance to storms; instead, most were secured with the same kinds of nails and pins that failed in 1999. Just 6 of 40 new homes had closet-size safe rooms.

Mayor Glenn Lewis of Moore said that since then, the town had strengthened building codes, including a requirement that new homes incorporate hurricane braces. The city has also aggressively promoted the construction of safe rooms and other measures, with more than $12 million from state and federal emergency management funds to subsidize safe-room construction by offering a $2,000 rebate, said Albert Ashwood, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management. Still, he said, it has been several years since Moore has received new financing for the program.

About a year and a half ago, Mr. McCarty, the builder, spoke to a group of Oklahoma legislators who were considering mandating shelters for new homes, he recalled. But no legislation was proposed, he said, because of the bad economy. A small, prefabricated sunken shelter can cost $4,000, he said, and “mandating another three or four thousand dollars on every new home can really add up when you’re trying to keep houses affordable.”

Houses in Oklahoma, Mr. McCarty said, are usually built on slabs without basements or crawl spaces because the land is flat and the weather is temperate enough that digging a deep foundation is not necessary, as it is with homes built in the Northeast, where the temperatures regularly dip below freezing.

“When you look at the flat land, and the amount it would cost to excavate and remove the dirt, the cost of the foundation to build a basement just adds a substantial amount to the cost of a new home,” Mr. McCarty said.

Mike Gilles, a former president of the Oklahoma State Home Builders Association, said that he built safe rooms in all his custom homes, and that even many builders who build speculatively now make them standard.

But asked whether the government should require safe rooms in homes, he said, “Most homebuilders would be against that because we think the market ought to drive what people are putting in the houses, not the government.”

Mr. Anselm, the official in Joplin, said that the city had applied to Missouri for emergency funds for safe rooms, but that the state used money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency primarily for disaster relief from flooding.

Beyond expense and construction standards, there is a local attitude about tornadoes that borders on temerity. There is a joke among Oklahomans that when the storm sirens sound, instead of taking cover, everyone goes outside and looks for the storm.

That was what Leon and Larry Harjo did Monday. The 45-year-old twins sat outside their brick home to see what was going on as the sirens blared and hailstones pelted. Only when they glimpsed the enormous funnel cloud barreling their way did they run to a medical center across the street to take cover in a hallway.

Even that was a harrowing experience; Larry Harjo said the wind had blown him and his wife around as they clutched each other on the ground. A door was ripped off its hinges, ceiling tiles fell, and they heard cars crashing against the building.

Would surviving the tornado make them think twice about waiting so long to hunker down the next time?

Larry Harjo said: “You can’t run every time you hear a warning. You’ll be scared your whole life.”

His brother added: “Might as well just sit back. If it gets you, it gets you. If not, another day.”

John Eligon contributed reporting from Moore, Okla., and Laurie Goodstein from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Amid Storm Recovery, Life-and-Death Stories From School: Why No Safe Room to Run To? Cost and Culture of the Plains. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe